One Night at Biff's

I did not know Mr. James Byrd, Jr. of Jasper Texas. At 49 he was my age. He was a vacuum cleaner salesman, as I was when I attended college. He was, from what I was able to glean from news reports, an unassuming man who was disabled due to seizure problems. He lived in his own apartment and lived an apparently quiet life.

He was also a black man, and this did not sit too well with three of his townspeople. Mr. Byrd was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to his death on country roads on the 7^th of June, 1998.

This particular racial incident hit me very hard. I really don't know why. There have been so many tragic and brutal ones in the past that it is hard to count them. Maybe it was the sheer horror of the images I saw in my mind: a human being dragged, alive, behind a speeding truck until he literally came apart.

The trial, verdict, and sentencing of John William King, one of the participants in this heinous act started me thinking about my own experiences regarding other races over the years. We all seem to remember where we were when some famous event took place. Where we were when the astronauts landed on the moon. Where we were when John Kennedy was assassinated. That sort of thing. My first experience with a racial incident was at a coffee shop called Biff's.

It was in Hollywood California, 1959. Biff's was a little coffee shop a block or so north of Hollywood Boulevard. It sat behind a grubby gas station on the northwest corner of Cahuenga Boulevard and Yucca Street. The area had a car wash, some small motels, and a lot of old four story brick apartment buildings. You Angelinos know the ones I mean: efficiencies and one-bedroom places that in those days housed school teachers and nurses, office girls and book keepers, minor TV and film industry workers, struggling authors or screenwriters. I am sure these buildings provided most of the Biff's "regulars". There was a liquor-grocery across the street, and the Capitol Records Building a few blocks away. Its "spindle" was visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows of Biff's.

Biff's was one of those oh-so-LA-looking places. It looked like something a bright eight-year-old with architectural aspirations fashioned out of a shirt cardboard with an X-Ac-To knife. Glass on three sides, tilted roof, long and skinny to the point it had but ONE very narrow table for three, and about fifteen or so counter seats. It looked like it was designed to squeeze into the corner of a gas station parking lot because, well, it DID squeeze into the corner of a gas station parking lot! Leave enough room for the grill, the coffee pot, a refrigerated dessert case, half a dozen parking spaces and two tiny restrooms. Presto! you had Biff's.

Times were a bit tight for our family. If mom had a spare buck or two at the end of the week she sometimes took my brother and me out for a burger. Biff's was close, cheap, reasonably clean, and decent.

This particular autumn night would prove different. We sat at the table and had already ordered. I was looking out the window to the 76, seeing the engine of a Good Humor truck hanging by a chain-hoist in one of the service bays. I was just thinking how TINY that engine seemed compared to the big V8 in our Pontiac when I was brought out of my thoughts by a very loud and rough voice to my right.

I turned my head to see a man standing there, filthy dirty in work clothing and a disposable paper painter's hat. I do not remember the exact words he used and would not quote them here if I did. He was being very abusive to a black man who, as near as I could tell, just wanted to chat with the lady next to him and eat his eggs and toast. I remember something was said about black men and white women but it went WAY over the head of this ten-year-old!

You could FEEL the tension in the air; everyone was looking! My mother gave me a motherly "turn around and act like you see nothing" grab on the arm, but everyone was watching! Finally, the waitress came around from behind the counter, walked right up to this lout and gave him the tongue lashing of his life. She was having none of this sort of thing in HER restaurant and told him to get his butt out of there. He threw down 2 bucks and walked out past us, grumbling obscenities under his breath. The waitress got a round of applause!

The part that hit me very hard was when I looked at the black man. He was weeping! The waitress went over and sat by him, and the fry cook set out the meals for the next few minutes. The rest of that evening has faded from my memory.

It is said we all have prejudices. Yes, we do, but I am also sure that most of us try to be reasonable in our views. NOT every Arab or Muslim is a terrorist. NOT every German is a Nazi. NOT every black man is some "gangsta" type who deals dope and calls a woman "bitch".

What is beyond me, however, is how someone can have such a deep down HATRED for a particular GROUP of human beings. It just does not seem reasonable or logical to me.

There seems to be a common starting point to this sort of behavior, though. One of the first steps is to take individuals and pigeonhole them in groups. You then make this group less than human, or characterize them in such extremes for so long that the myths become reality.

Joseph Goebbels, I believe, said that if you tell a lie long enough it will become the truth. His propaganda machine churned out endless stories and pictures of Jews showing them in incredibly bad light. I recall seeing the front page of a Nazi newspaper that ran an article about Jews raping "aryan" women. The accompanying picture was of a droopy-eyed Chasidic man who looked diseased and sick. It did not matter that there were blond, blue-eyed Jews who were not sick. The GROUP image was of that dissipated Chasid.

The US propaganda machine did this dehumanizing of the Japanese during World War II. I doubt there is anyone under the age of 60 that does not remember the stereotype of the huge teeth and thick round eyeglasses, the speech with no "L" sounds. It mattered little that there were plenty of Japanese who spoke English with the same accents as the others in their region, and who had normal teeth and good eyesight. "They" were "all like that".

The United States has often been described as a melting pot. It really never has been so, or we'd all be praying in the same church. We'd all wear the same clothing. We would all identify with Garrison Keillor's characters. We'd all be eating casseroles using canned cream of mushroom soup as a base. Bagels? Chow Mien? What are those?

I picture the US as more of a buffet table, where we are offered a huge variety from which to pick. We adopt customs and tastes that are to our liking or in our traditions, but at bottom we are all still Americans with a common language and many common goals and dreams.

There seems to be a concerted effort to break this down. It is the movement that is being called "multi-culturalism", or "diversity". The schools are teaching our children the differences between us and emphasizing them, rather than pointing out those common points that make us Americans. This is a far cry from the song we sang at my elementary school: "We work and play together, we are Americans all!"

I certainly do not want to return to the days when Christianity was assumed in the schools ("No, Sammy, the other children don't CARE about Chanukah!"). Those days when Roman Catholic kids got an excused absence for Good Friday but the Jewish kids were counted absent for Yom Kippur. That, to use our 9 year old vocabulary of the time, "stunk!". (I see no justification for ANY religious holiday to be celebrated in a taxpayer-funded school, but that is another topic entirely).

Now, we have gone so far the other way. Many ethnic groups have celebrations set aside for them (Cinco de Mayo comes to mind as an example, Kwanzaa is another). Then one group complains because their group didn't get as much time or materials for "their" holiday. This can in the long run prove dangerous. We are emphasizing our differences to the point that we are falling into groups rather than being recognized as individuals. Notice the word "group"?

You "old timers" (older than 35 or 40): did you used to think of yourself in ethnic terms? Were you an American descended from Swedes, or did you think of yourself as a Swedish-American? Did the children of your local laundry owner call themselves Chinese-Americans? No. They did not. It is only with a sense of irony that I think of myself as an Austrian-German-Spanish-Russian-left-handed-red-haired-American.

I believe we need to return to a time when we were all, simply, Americans. Sure, some of us might eat lutefisk while the family down the street eats stuffed kishkeh. We might celebrate Chanukah while the folks next door celebrate the Solstice or Christmas, or the birth if Mithra. Our immigrant fathers and mothers may have spoken a native language at home, but they often, and the kids always, learnt the language of their new land, American English.

If we think of ourselves as individuals who are Americans, rather than as a member of a hyphenated group we will all be better off. There will be far less of this "they all do this", "they all think that". Had Mr. Byrd been seen as an individual, he might still be alive today.

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